Half million mobile calls at Olympics

Much roaming from Bird's Nest, according to China Mobile

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Half a million people phoned home during the fireworks

A China Mobile spokesman has reported that nearly half a million calls were made on the company's GSM network from in and around the Bird's Nest stadium during the opening and closing Olympic ceremonies.

Cellular-newsreport that over 250,000 roaming service calls were registered during the stadium's opening ceremony, while around 24,000 calls, including 20,000 international connections, were made from the stadium in Sunday's closing ceremony.

100 percent connection

China Mobile says it achieved a 100 percent connection rate and only 0.27 percent of calls were dropped by the network.

Around 1.2 million China Mobile users watched the games on mobile phones, and 13 million phone-users received Olympic newsletters.

The quality of service China Mobile managed to provide gives some indication of the effectiveness of the country's recently-developed TD-SCDMA 3G system, which China intends as an alternative to the Western Wideband CDMA and CDMA2000.